Author(s)

Reham Elsamnty¹, Ahmed Mohamed Attiya², Esmat Abdel Fattah Abdallah³, Abdel Hadi Ammar¹

¹Electrical Engineering Department, Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt.
²Microwave Engineering Department, Electronics Research Institute, Giza, Egypt.
³Microstrip Department, Electronics Research Institute, Giza, Egypt.

This study introduces a new design of planar antenna array for ISM band applications at 2.4 GHz. This prototype is switched beam antenna, namely planar antenna with four meandered slotted triangular elements (PAFMSTE), which is proposed for wireless indoor applications. The Base Station (BS) equipped with this planar antenna is preferred to be at the center position on the room ceiling to cover all sectors of the room. It is designed to use four directional triangular elements arranged to form a square planar antenna array. The PAFMSTE is used to obtain optimal directivity in four directions in azimuth plane with 3 dB beamwidth of 90° at a specific orientation of 30° in elevation plane. Switched parasitic technique is used to enable PAFMSTE to steer a directional beam through four locations by using four PIN diodes switches. The High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS) is used as an efficient simulation tool to optimize the performance of the PAFMSTE antenna. The fabrication and measurements of the PAFMSTE antenna are introduced. The proposed antenna enable radio positioning via Angle of Arrival (AOA) information collected from nearby devices. Then, the Cramér-Rao Bound (CRB) is presented for AOA estimation using identically and equally spaced antenna elements. The CRB depends on the directivity, where the maximum values of CRB are 1.35 × 10^-3 and 8 × 10^-3 at HPBW of 60° and 90°, respectively.

Indoor Communications, Switched Beam Antenna, Directional Microstrip Antenna, Slotted Patch Antenna, Radio-Positioning, AOA Estimation, CRB

Elsamnty, R. , Attiya, A. , Abdallah, E. and Ammar, A. (2016) A 2.4 GHz Switched Beam Antenna for Indoor Applications Using Angle of Arrival Estimation. Open Journal of Antennas and Propagation, 4, 109-118. doi: 10.4236/ojapr.2016.43008.